July 23, 2010
By Peter van der Merwe

Ask any teenager what social media they use, and chances are they’ll look at you strangely. To them, it’s not social media – it’s just staying in touch. And to do that, they’ll use whatever’s cheapest and easiest: mostly MXit and Facebook.

Ah, Facebook. The dinosaurs get all huffy about its privacy settings. The Tweens don’t care. They just use it. They “inbox” each other. Organise parties their parents don’t even want to know about. Post embarrassing photos of aforementioned parties so their parents can find out later. Comment on each other’s hairdos. Express their angst in *** iLLiterAte PrOSe tHaT uSeS aRBiTraRY CaPItaLs ***.  Hatch plots to bring down The System and take over the world. And so on.

But Facebook is so much more than just a teenage tool, or a nice-to-have social networking site that lets us stay in touch with what our old primary school buddies are up to. In other parts of the world, it’s a valuable communications tool – and for some small businesses, a marketing tool. After all, “inboxing” is far cheaper than voice calls or sms.

Free Facebook?

So MTN’s announcement of what is basically free Facebook for the rest of Africa is a massive drive into a largely untapped market. A big question is why the heck they aren’t launching it in South Africa as well, but that’s another discussion. Perhaps, if enough local teenagers get indignant about it, they’ll change their minds. But we digress.

What Facebook has done is create a new mobile Facebook site – 0.facebook.com – which MTN users across the rest of Africa can browse without incurring any data charges at all. Very nice for them.

Of course, there are some drawbacks. Even freedom has a price, you know. For a start, you have to be an MTN subscriber. Second, it has no photos or images. You can see photos – but to do so, you click away from the site, and start paying. But what free Facebook does is allow our African brothers and sisters to stay in contact when they don’t even have enough airtime for other forms of communication.

Emerging markets

It’s a shrewd move — and an extremely powerful play by both Facebook and MTN into emerging markets across Africa and the Middle East. For Facebook, it means the potential addition of millions more people to their databases hidden deep beneath the cornfields of Boise, Idaho – or wherever they are. For MTN, it’s making mobile access to the Internet a reality for many more people, with the near-certainty that at some stage they will use the more lucrative paid services.

Right now, though, South Africa’s teenagers couldn’t care less, they want free Facebook too! And if they got it, it would send the sales of MTN prepaid SIM cards through the roof.